"I drove a limo for a maniacal man"
"Take 'em where they wanna go" was the generals command"
"Where you headed" was the question I most asked?"
"When someone asked me back that day was my last"
Now I know it's full of in-proper grammar and takes four lines to get to the point but it does have one and it's based on a guy that I worked for, for about two years. Truly maniacal. (One thing I should mention here is that I originally wrote and my wife sang 'manical' on the recording we made and we like very much and now there's really no way to go back and change it which was/is sort of idiotic in itself.) This guy had this transportation 'business' with the Minneapolis-St Paul airport where you take people from the airport to hotels in the St. Paul area. There was also a Minneapolis Airport limo service which as far as I know was much more legit and did much more business since Minneapolis had all the nightlife and therefore hotels to go with it. The thing is this guy had permits for about six vans (which is what they were, not limo's but old econoline, I think, vans) but he had close to 30 of them on the road. He had no garage but his own 'one car home garage' and these vans were parked out on the street in front of his house when they weren't on the road or in the 'garage'. I don't know how he got his neighbors to put up with it. He had around 30 of us guys diving these things around in two shifts from about five or six in the morning till eleven or twelve at night. We each paid him around thirty-five dollars a shift, paid for the gas and kept whatever was left. The customers paid around five to eight dollars a piece to go to their hotel from the airport. We were competing with the taxi cabs (which would take you straight to where you were going) and of course with each other just the way he wanted it. We were ruthlessly smiling as we stabbed each other in the back and slipped money to the crooked as our mirrors dispatcher. We would load up the van and take people to different hotels, going to the closest first.
This was quite a scam with quite a low overhead and I still don't know how much of it was legal or not I mean he had a desk at the airport and a spot outside for loading but I know the Minneapolis service had a real garage, not as many drivers and more customers. I know we (the drivers) didn't pay any taxes and I'm sure he paid far less than he could/should have. (I did see him on the local news many years after I had left and they were trying to shut him down but he wasn't going for it). Needless to say the drivers this guy was hiring were hard up and could not find work anywhere else for various reasons or were just plain idiots.
I can now count myself in the latter group but at the time there was even more to it, you see I had just lost my license due to a DUI. So I was surprised, amazed and maybe suspicious that I got a job driving people around, people who were from out of town and looking to relax, live a little and not die. A girl who's brother use to drive there and then dispatched for Minneapolis told me about it one night at the local bar and she said he knew there would be no questions about my license. I doubt if any one there had one. They were mostly felons, young clueless wanna be studs gonna be felons, druggies, reformed alcoholics and as in my own case, practicing alcoholics.
Speaking of being under the influence this guy had tremendous influence which came in handy for me when I came to work one morning after having never gone to sleep and still freshly drunk. I drove the van into the back of a car right downtown before even getting to my first hotel stop. I jumped out, left the scene and went to a hotel to call him. Nothing ended up happening, nothing at all. No ticket, no incarceration or interrogation, it was like it never happened. Of course I had to work for him seven days a week till eleven at night (which gave me only a couple hours to drink) to keep me out of trouble, he said, and I believed him because he was right. Of course the truth was as long as I kept drinking I was under his influence. It took a couple years to get out from under both and two more years to meet my wife who has never seen the drunken idiot and I 'm thankful for that, for that is a whole different breed not very original, trustworthy or lovable.
Sober idiots unite and stand straight and proud.
Maybe that's another reason I take it all in stride. Stand united.
